Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground

If you know anything about me at all, I have a passion for the history of tabletop roleplaying. One of the books that helped stoke my interest was the book Heroic Worlds, which I read when I was in middle school. That book was a high level overview of the roleplaying game books that were on the market at the time – like the tabletop RPG equivalent of all those Leonard Maltin books giving an overview, one-to-two sentence of a film’s plot, and a one-to-two sentence review combined with a score. Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground provides a more close in view, covering a selection of RPG books from each decade of RPG history to date, with more involved looks at the various games.

So, if there’s a major RPG title that came out over the medium’s history, it’s generally covered here. Dungeons & Dragons? Check! Runequest? You bet! The Fantasy Trip? Sure thing. Vampire: The Masquerade? It’s in there. Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark? Sure thing. Even (as the subtitle says) Mothership. These are included alongside various smaller titles and significant, if not as well known, sourcebooks for the various games that are covered. Stuff like some of the adventure collections for Call of Cthulu or Cults of Prax for Runequest. We even get a couple significant titles from Palladium – like Rifts and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles And Other Strangeness.

We get some very nice, involved looks at the games and sourcebooks, with the author’s serious thoughts on the books, along with how well they have or have not held up with time – such as with the Sanity rules casually shoehorned into TMNT or the entirety of Oriental Adventures. It’s not a full-fledged buyer’s guide, instead serving something of a critical overview.

It’s not without some problems. While the book is very much aware of some of the prejudices and biases in past works (again, Oriental Adventures), the book has a massive oversight issue. Specifically, the focus is very heavy on games from the Anglo-European zone – while some translated games are covered, they’re exclusively European titles like In Nomine or Kult. Games translated from Japanese (like Maid) or works inspired by Asian media – whether anime (Big Eyes Small Mouth), action cinema from Hong Kong and Taiwan (Hong Kong Action Theater and Feng Shui). The most we get is a passing mention of the Robotech RPG in the entry of TMNT.

This is particularly odd considering, for example, Feng Shui’s mook rules would help influence the Minion rules for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition (which is mentioned in the book). Robotech introduced the Megadamage rules which would carry over to Rifts. However, there’s no real mention or in-depth entries on either of those games. It’s kind of head-scratchingly frustrating (not helped by the fact that it also perpetuates the worldview that TRPGs are an Anglo-European (and predominantly White) thing. This is particularly weird because, again, the book does try to acknowledge contributions of Black and Asian creators in the book.

I did very much enjoy the book, and it makes for a very good starting point for people who want to learn more about historical titles in tabletop roleplaying history. However, I do feel like the book runs into some bugbears that are specific to me.